In part three, Night Country starts to resemble a classic police procedural, at least structurally. Autopsies (well, kind of) and interrogations; manhunts and working sources. There’s even a rivalry brewing between Pete Prior’s computer-reliant investigations and Evangeline Navarro’s beat policing. When Pete can’t find a person of interest in the Social Security database, for example, he claims he doesn’t exist; meanwhile, Navarro digs up the nonexistent guy’s address in a day with the help of the “mukluk telegraph.†Because even when Night Country is tightly focused on the unsolved cases, both Annie K.’s and the Tsalal deaths, it’s about everything else, too. Ennis isn’t a place; it’s a set of preoccupations that mostly boil down to the same one thing. The old versus the new. We were here before.
We’re back on the tundra again, only this time we’re looking for one guy instead of eight. Ray Clark remains at large, and Hank is in charge, so I can only imagine it’s not a top priority. The series is working so hard to make Hank seem like a dipshit — this week, he recruits any cowboy with a rifle and a camo thermosuit to join the police manhunt — that I’m starting to wonder if perhaps he’s not one. Does he really think it’s a good idea to sic his hunting buddies on their only suspect, or is he relishing pushing Liz’s buttons? Evangeline joins the search, too, but between the ice and the old mining dredges, there are miles of dark to cover, and the only meaningful development involves an orange. Evangeline picks up an orange that one of Hank’s hillbillies drops, perhaps because in Alaska during winter that’s like finding a fiver. But later, when she throws it into the night, it boomerangs back in her direction. Did someone throw it back? Did it hit something real or rebound off the edge of the universe? Is the ghostly whispering in the background in her head, or is it just the wind playing tricks on my own ears?
The real hunt for Clark, by which I mean the one with any hope of producing results, is happening back at headquarters, where Liz is combing through 19 boxes of his effects, which include Annie K.’s missing cell phone. But when she calls in Navarro for help, Pete grows suspicious. Maybe he’s just curious or maybe he senses his place as teacher’s pet is under threat. He asks Liz what went down in the Wheeler case — the one that Evangeline name-checked last week — and Liz, shockingly, does not tell him to fuck off. William Wheeler was an animal and a criminal who, after his most recent prison release, took up with an 18-year-old girl. He beat her, but she never pressed charges; eventually, he killed her, Danvers says, and then he killed himself.
Except, as we see in flashback, that’s not what happened. When Danvers and Navarro arrived at the murder scene, a remorseless Wheeler was whistling a little ditty. So who shot him? Right now, I could make a case for either of the women, though I suppose smart money is on Navarro. Liz has enough disregard for the rules, don’t get me wrong; she just doesn’t seem to care about people as much. And Pete, for his part, suspects he’s being fed half the truth.
Starting with the evidence boxes, it doesn’t take long for Liz and Navarro to build out a rough sketch of Annie and Ray’s relationship. They were happy together. Liz deduces from a T-shirt that they’d been together since 2016, since Ari dropped Dangerous Woman. The romance was a secret, Evangeline insists, but Liz knows about Evangeline and Qaavik, and, according to Evangeline, everybody knows about Liz and Ted Connelly (gross), so maybe there’s no such thing as a secret romance. Someone always knows. Who took the one candid photo in Ray’s stack? The one stained blue with hair dye.
Enter Susan, Annie’s bestie–slash–hair colorist. As Evangeline questions her mercilessly about Annie’s death, Liz makes her daughter some mac and cheese, proving she can be good with kids — just not with Leah. (Though when I realized it was the ghastly gooey cheese and not the superior powdered-cheese kind, I did wonder why this adorable little girl was being punished.) Susie gave haircuts at Tsalal and Annie tagged along and met Ray, who was crazy about her. Annie was the one who wanted to keep the relationship secret, which suited Susie, because she had her own Tsalal boyfriend on the down-low — Oliver Tagaq, the equipment engineer on site (though he skipped town before Annie’s death). Evangeline can’t believe that Susan would keep such a promising lead a secret for all this time, but it turns out that’s not the whole truth. Susan did phone in an anonymous tip to the Ennis PD. Can you guess who took the call? Here’s a hint: His den is ultramarine, and most of his life savings have recently been converted to rubles.
Navarro thinks Hank is covering for the mines, who were behind the murder, but it’s hard to square that with … anything else? Like Annie’s tongue resurfacing at Tsalal. Liz isn’t convinced, but she also doesn’t share Narvarro’s belief in the case’s spectral dimension. Evangeline seems comfortable with the notion that some things can be explained by policework and others by whatever else is out there. And yet, Liz and Evangeline clearly like each other. They’re more open and curious in each other’s company than anyone else’s. Liz shares that she cruises Tinder in Fairbanks when the nights get too long and cold, but Evangeline makes the more stunning confession. When she’s lonely, she prays. Not to tell God what she needs, but to hear what the world is trying to say back. Doesn’t Liz feel it, too, sometimes? The compulsion to disappear.
It all goes down at the ice rink in the end, where six Tsalal scientists are almost but not entirely thawed out. Hank stops by to make amends for slugging Pete by offering to take his grandson out skating. Navarro happens by at the same time and threatens Hank’s life for withholding evidence. Hank’s only defense is that Annie was a bit of a slut, actually, and when Liz says she’s going to write up his negligence, he basically calls her a slut, too, accusing his boss of playing “Mrs. Robinson†with his son. Liz tips a cup of coffee in Hank’s face, which, by his reaction, must not have been scalding hot, but how was Liz to know that? Hank walks out with dreams of vengeance written all over his mildly burnt face, and Navarro leaves in a huff. Pete, who looks way younger that Benjamin Braddock did in The Graduate, asks who Mrs. Robinson is. The showdown is a little comical but also menacing. The four people tasked with keeping Ennis safe all can’t stand each other to varying degrees.
Navarro heads to Qaavik’s icehouse to ask for help finding Oliver through his bootlegging contacts, which he agrees to do because he loooves her and wants to get to know her better. (And, more cynically, because this was as elegant a moment as any for Issa López to shoehorn in a “quid pro quo†reference without things feeling too hammy.) But the interaction did make me wonder how long Qaavik and Eve, as he calls her, have been casually bumping into each other. Liz knows about the liaison, and yet Qaavik seems to know little about Eve, and the pressure he’s putting on her to be more intimate feels new. Qaavik asks about Eve and Julia’s mother, who left these parts for Boston when she was 15 and didn’t come back until she was desperate to escape the drunk and abusive father of her two young daughters. “Alaska girls always come back,†Qaavik says like he’s heard a version of this chilling story a hundred times before. Eve’s mother was ill; like Julia again this week, she heard voices and had “episodes.†And then, one day, she just didn’t come home again. Unsolved murder. Their mother died before ever telling her girls their Iñupiat names.
Cultural exploration and cultural curiosity are part three’s most salient themes. When Navarro and Liz eventually catch up with Oliver, living in a small fishing village where women mend nets in the same manner that scarred Annie’s tongue, he asks Evangeline her “real†name.
“Oh, you forgot, didn’t you?†Oliver says when she can’t answer, his tone taunting.
This is where people go to live when they don’t want to be within reach. To be a cop, to burst into his home uninvited? He’s accusing Evangeline of forgetting much more than a name. He’s overwhelmingly affected when they tell him about the deaths of his former colleagues at Tsalal and orders them out without any explanation. Another line of inquiry that’s run dry.
But this is a pressure point for Navarro — the tension between her culture and her career, between who she is and what she does. Part three opens with a flashback to Annie K. working as a midwife at the area’s last birthing center. Evangeline turns up to arrest her for destroying mine property but ends up assisting with a water birth. Evangeline looks genuinely terrified, like maybe she wasn’t entirely sure where babies come from. Though it takes Annie a minute to resuscitate her, the baby is fine. Evangeline pours hot water into the bath; she’s invited into a circle of women she feels connected to.
It’s the same journey of self-discovery that Leah’s on. Yes, in the heedless world of teenage rebellion, that total miscreant has worked up the nerve to join the mining protest movement. Take that, Liz. Despite all your best efforts at neglect, you’re raising a civic-minded young woman who cares about the community. (Kind of like a cop should, come to think of it.) It turns out that the harrowing birth that opened the episode foreshadowed something terrible to come. There’s been another stillbirth in the villages, no doubt connected to the toxic runoff at Silver Sky.
What is it about Leah’s activism and her completely age-appropriate curiosity about culture and identity that Liz finds so threatening? In one particularly horrific scene, she forces Leah into the bathroom to wipe the Magic Marker tattoo from her chin. Is it a mother’s fear — fear of what can happen around Ennis to women who mark themselves out as Iñupiat and make trouble for the mine? Does it have something to do with whatever happened to Jake? If the answer is as simple and ugly as racism, why would Liz visit the house of the stillborn child, where a kind of funeral is taking place? The scene of mourning overwhelms Liz, and she escapes to a bathroom without saying a word of hello or condolence to anyone.
And at work, she’s running out of time. Connelly threatened to ship the dead bodies to Anchorage the moment they were thawed, and Liz can’t get a forensic tech to town because of the snowstorms. Eager Beaver Peter, who we learn leaves his iPhone notifications on overnight in case the chief needs him, suggests they bring in his cousin, a livestock vet who lives a few towns over. Needs must. The vet tells Liz and Pete that these men didn’t die of cold. Cold sedates big animals, and they die peacefully. If he had to guess, the Tsalal scientists died of cardiac arrest before they froze. And he’s seen it before, he tells them. He’s seen caribou die of fright, maybe like the unexplained stampede of caribou from the opening minutes of the first episode.
Just when it seems like every line of inquiry has exhausted itself, Dr. Lund wakes up on the 23rd of December — the sixth full day of night. The man has no legs and no eyesight, but he’s just alert enough for Liz and Navarro to question him. Everything he says makes perfect and little sense. “We woke her,†he says. “She’s awake†— same as Ray, same as the whispers that Liz and Navarro have heard. “She came for us.†But who is he talking about? The obvious guess is Annie, but how or why or what the fuck? When Liz gets called to the ER waiting room to quiet a brawl, we get more of a sense of what it could mean for a dead person to be awake. Earlier in the episode, Navarro hits her head on the ice and feels Danvers’s son’s hand on her shoulder. Now, in the hospital, Lund turns to her like he’s possessed and tells her that her mother says hello. “She’s waiting for you,†he adds before crashing and, I assume, dying.
Then, of course, there are more literal ways for the dead to reanimate. Pete shows up at the hospital, having finally cracked Annie K.’s cell phone. There’s a video that Annie’s taken of herself, talking in the same confusing short sentences as Lund. “I found it,†she says, maybe from an ice cave or an igloo. “It’s here.†She looks terrified until she drops her phone, screaming in bloody horror at whatever has found her in return.
“We were here before.†It’s the rallying cry that the activists repeat at the protest Leah sneaks off to with her girlfriend. They mean they were here before the mines. They mean a culture older than the white colonialists who came in search of land and resources. But given the series’ supernatural bent, it’s hard not to hear something prophetic in it, too. We were here before. This is not our first time here. Even the dead don’t leave — souls bound to this place. There have been a few allusions to True Detective’s season one sprinkled into season four, but to me, they’ve so far felt like Easter eggs — cheap thrills for diligent viewers that create more mood than meaning.
But maybe something more is starting to coalesce — a theory of existence that connects the separate stories. Annie’s friend Susan tells Navarro and Liz that the spiral motif came to Annie in a recurring dream, over and over and over again, ending only when she got the tattoo. If “we were here before,†then maybe Matthew McConaughey’s Rust was right in season one, too: “Everything we have done or will do, we will do over and over and over again forever.†Maybe time really is a flat circle, or a spiral pressed into the skin.